hank1931

How about Erlang or Elixir using BEAM?

Supposedly WhatsApp scaled to serving over 1 billion users with Erlang and BEAM.

RabbitMQ, used by Reddit, uses Erlang and BEAM.

Discord uses Elixer and BEAM.

I just traveled down the BEAM rabbit hole. Fascinating story. The Ericsson Computer Science Laboratory cranked out some amazing products in the early 1990's.

Their goal was five nines of reliability for Ericsson telephone switches.

According to Joe Armstrong (an interesting fellow from Ericsson), the AXD301 ATM switch achieved nine nines over a nine-month period using Erlang and BEAM in 2002. That calculates out to 24 milliseconds of downtime.

Here, I will give you my upvote! That's how Issuetrak is. The founder (me), still owns a majority of the stock, there's no outside investment, and we have customers who've been with us more than 20 years. Multiple employees as well!

AI won't replace Ann Wroe at The Economist. It is difficult to appreciate until you've read a few, but Ann Wroe's approach transformed The Economist's obituary section into one of the most widely read features in international journalism.

I do this too. I use Claude. I picked a voice I like. I go on a three mile walk. I will ask it questions about a topic that I want to learn about. If it starts telling me more than I want to hear right then, I will say "stop". It doesn't get offended. I then ask it something else. I find this very effective. I control it so it only explains to me what I want explained. If what it says sparks questions on a related topic I jump to a brand new topic. No personal tutor could keep up with this or adjust to exactly how I want to be addressed like Claude does. I'm very excited about the progress I'm making mastering new topics.

And yes, it is not that it is just presenting the facts. By me taking control of the direction the questions and answers go, I can flesh out my mental model. I won't retain every little thing it tells me. But I am much farther ahead than before.

On my iPhone, when I press Audition, it looks like it is playing something, but I do not hear anything coming through the speaker.

I see your point. The others are self-hosted, and you bring your own key. Personally, I like the convenience Eve's online account provides. It's dead simple to be up and off to the races, getting useful work done with little effort. After struggling with OpenClaw, it has been a very pleasant experience. Several people in our company are using it now.

Check out Eve (https://eve.new). I saw it here on Hacker News after I decided OpenClaw was too raw for me. Eve is amazing. My theory as to why it's so good is that the founders have a strong background in design -- they met getting their masters in design at UC Berkeley. Their secret sauce is the harness they've constructed IMHO.

Here is what Zach Dive said in the original HN announcement--

Eve is an AI agent harness that runs in an isolated Linux sandbox (2 vCPUs, 4GB RAM, 10GB disk) with a real filesystem, headless Chromium, code execution, and connectors to 1000+ services.

You give it a task and it works in the background until it's done.

I built this because I wanted OpenClaw without the self-hosting, pointed at actual day-to-day work. I'm thinking less personal assistant and more helpful colleague.

The main interface is a web app where you can watch work happen in real time (agents spawning, files being written, use of the CLI). There's also an iMessage integration so you can fire a task asynchronously, put your phone down, and get a reply when it's finished.

Under the hood, there's an orchestrator (Claude Opus 4.6) that routes to the right domain-specific model for each subtask: browsing, coding, research, and media generation.

For complex tasks it spins up parallel sub-agents that coordinate through the shared filesystem. They have persistent memory across sessions so context compounds over time.

I've packaged it with a bunch of pre-installed skills so it can execute in a variety of job roles (sales, marketing, finance) at runtime.

I fed Claude the WSJ article, and asked it to come up with a summary I could post here. It sounded too much like AI wrote it. So I asked it to summarize again but sounding more like my voice and not an AI voice. It still failed, but I thought I'd post its summary anyway. It is a fascinating story.

"A college kid at RIT cracked one of the biggest cyberattacks ever seen, mostly from his dorm room. Benjamin Brundage mapped out a botnet called Kimwolf — 2 million hacked Android devices being rented out to launch massive DDoS attacks — by infiltrating hacker chat rooms and sweet-talking insiders with cat memes. His research eventually fed into a federal takedown. The feds are sending him a t-shirt. "

As a student I worked at a lab, and had a PDP-11/10 all to myself. But of course I desired more. I heard such wonderful things about the 11/34. Six years later I worked for a small company that was able to purchase a PDP-11/70 running RSTS/E. I had died and gone to heaven!!

Love the Mitch Hedberg reference! Thank you! Always good to get a little Mitch!

‘I don’t have a girlfriend. But I do know a woman who’d be mad at me for saying that.’

‘I’m against picketing, but I don’t know how to show it.’

‘I haven’t slept for ten days, because that would be too long.’

‘I like to play blackjack. I’m not addicted to gambling. I’m addicted to sitting in a semi-circle.’

Are you kidding me? Is there any one person giving better AI updates nowadays than Simonw? Back in the day, there used to be these EF Hutton commercials. There'd be some scene of a bunch of people. One person would say something like, “My broker says…” and another would respond, “Well, my broker is EF Hutton, and EF Hutton says…”. And the whole restaurant or whatever would get silent so they could hear what EF Hutton says. It was great!

I feel the same way about Simon Willison. He's a treasure!

Here's a few of those EF Hutton commercials for your viewing pleasure--

https://youtu.be/2MXqb1a3Apg

https://youtu.be/sc2GpmLx82k

Yep, that's how I feel when Simon Willison speaks!

Including the Trump family

Thanks for the comment. To think, a Hacker News person was in our offices. How cool!!

This link is fascinating. I had no idea that the U.S. government definition of small business was so elaborate. I asked ChatGPT, and it turns out there are 978 industries, covered by 102 different size standards! Why did they come up with this? If a company meets their criteria, it can qualify for government contracts, loans, grants, advocacy programs and more.

According to ChatGPT:

To come up with this list, the U.S. Census Bureau provides detailed information on industries, including employment, revenue, and business structure. SBA economists analyze factors like average firm size, capital intensity, and industry concentration to determine reasonable thresholds for “small businesses.” They study the competition between small and large businesses in federal procurement, considering small businesses’ ability to compete for contracts. The annual budget for the SBA is $1 billion. This does not include $50 billion in various loan programs.

Here's a link to the ChatGPT session: https://chatgpt.com/share/6798e036-7f9c-8008-9190-b704d1cde5...

The U.S. Small Business Administration is a big operation!

We're a 33-year-old small company, with thirty employees. I started the company in 1992 to do custom programming (VB and MS Access) and network support (Novell NetWare). I slowly grew to five employees. In 2000 I did not enjoy billing out our hours, so I decided to develop a product -- a web-based issue tracking application to help with IT support. The transition from a services business to a product business was much more difficult than I anticipated, but we made it. Now Issuetrak is doing fine. From what I read on Hacker News, there are nice aspects to working in a small company. We have no outside investment, so we call our own shots. Everyone is close to the customers. We listen to all team members' ideas. Everyone knows who is contributing. We can work from home. After 25 years of taking customer suggestions, our product is robust. We provide prompt, very good telephone support. We win deals (and lose them too) against competitors that are 400 times our size. One of the biggest satisfactions is that when we survey our customers after each support encounter, it is not unusual to hear them say that Issuetrak is the best software company they've ever dealt with. My salary is probably less than that of many FANG engineers, but life is good.

Thank you for turning me on to Atlas Obscura! I downloaded the app, and have already marked several places I want to visit, and others that I've been to. Looking forward to working with it more!

I happened to have been in Thailand recently, and came across these statues holding up traffic lights. I found it fascinating that a city council would devote resources to something like this. I'm looking forward to seeing other treasures that Atlas Obscura has.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/krabi-traffic-lights

When on the "My Designs" list, if you choose the vertical three dots way on the right, Delete is spelled Detele. Other than that, well even with that, you've come up with an amazing app!!